Verisign moves Root Server

November 8th, 2002
By Demys News service

In the first such move since 1997, VeriSign has repositioned one of the thirteen key Internet domain name servers, which help to route Internet traffic, to protect against future denial of service attacks.

Ten of the thirteen name servers are located in the USA, with one each in London, Stockholm and Tokyo and, like a telephone book, they match domain names with the IP addresses the Internet uses to locate web pages or other resources. The name server system is layered like an onion, so that a user who wants to go to specific address, such as "demys.net", will first attempt to get the information from a local server. If the domain is not found, the request gets escalated up to a domain name server for the top-level domain, such as ".net". At the very centre of "the onion" are the thirteen name servers which are therefore consulted fairly rarely. In fact, most requests they do receive are often from misconfigured networks which haven't cached the previous answers to recent queries for a faster response.

As a result of this distributed set up last month's denial of service attacks - alleged to have originated from computers in the USA and Korea - that targeted all 13 servers at the same time had little effect on end users. However, VeriSign is not taking any chances and has moved one of the two servers it manages to a different physical location and on to a different part of its network. It is hoped that this will prevent any possible disruption to their name servers in future.